At the beginning of the sequence the Railway Path is, for the first time, facing a pedestrian crossing. This is a striking event since it is the very first obstacle: obligation to stop, to steps, and to press the button requesting the traffic interruption. The green road is otherwise mostly on a reserved lane and isolated from the city. At the arrival at the former Warmley station, three elements are diversifying the use manners of the cycle path and increasing its urban integration:
- The crossing of an arterial road (A420) frequented by buses cut the route and take it apart.
- The transformation of the old station into a coffee shop changes the vocation of the platform and superimpose a static mode onto the mostly dynamic use of the track.
- The scenography conveys the rail story of the area (mannequins, traveler’s statues), this heritage valorization humanizes the place through cultural work.
The previous set of interpretations is assuming a theory pretending that use mixes are intensifying urbanities (1).
The sequence comes to an end when it approaches the motorway. Car infrastructures are an integral part of cities and sized accordingly to their range. Meeting the ring road network then is a sign of the location’s urban characteristic. Beside this, and paradoxically, as those great bitumen stretches get closer, a desertification phenomenon occurs. The social behaviours that were earlier visible (such as strolls, walks, sports, wild swimming) and that could be identified as urban marks seem to be totally gone. The grey weather, the slowly windy field of wheal, the irregular noise of the painfully rotating bike wheel, the heavy sound of the motorway thud, are all staging disuse, and perhaps even the death allegory.
Wheatfield with Crows, Vincent Van Gogh
Yet, as mentioned in the paragraph introduction, the place’s nature is intrinsically urban. The term disuse is mistaken because the area is intensely used. The variety of appropriation is weakened by the predominance of the network function (roads, high voltage lines, cycle lanes).
(1) Urbanity :
"The urbanity brings to mind, in the common sense, a quality of individuals behaving politely with others, in a second meaning, peculiar to geography, the urban character of a place. In this second meaning, the urbanity can be defined as issued from the combination of density and diversity of society object in a place.” (Lussault, 2003)
Use the arrows to travel from sequences to sequences
